Granny's Tea Set - a link to our pioneering past

Granny’s tea set on display on our kitchen table in 2024

My wife Ellen Linda was tidying up the other day (as is her wont) and when I wandered in to see how much she was enjoying herself, I found her in the dining room, mulling over a rediscovered treasure. “Have a look at this” she said, her eyes glowing. “It’s Granny’s Tea Set”.

We got them out, cups, saucers, plates, milk and cream jugs and sugar bowl, and I photographed them on the kitchen table. They are bone porcelain, as light as a feather, with a simple but attractive motif around the rim of each piece. I doubt they would attract the big dollar on The Antiques Roadshow, but they are of serious significance to us [Endnote 1].

Ellen’s Granny was Linda Smith who, with her husband Neil was a pioneering settler on Group Settlement 11 at Boojetup (north-west of Manjimup) in the lower south-west of WA. The tea set was given to Linda as a wedding present when she married Neil in 1914. It travelled with her from the city when they moved into their first camp in a hut in the bush at Boojetup in 1922, and survived moves to different cottages over the years. Eventually it was given by Linda as a wedding present to Ellen, when we were married in 1966. We currently have it earmarked as our wedding present to our Great-Granddaughter (another Ellen Linda). However, as she is not yet a year old, and we are in our eighties, it might well be a posthumous gift.

A word about the Group Settlement Scheme in WA (for those who came in late).

The scheme was conceived jointly by the British and Western Australian governments in the wake of the first World War. The idea was to provide opportunities for ex-servicemen (most of whom would come from the UK) to move to the south-west of Western Australia and become farmers. At the same time, it would establish a new, and much-needed dairy industry in the region.

The scheme was unrealistically promoted, with prospective settlers shown images of sunny landscapes with cattle grazing on lush pastures. They were told they would be given an assisted passage to Western Australia and then taken by train to their waiting farm.

The reality was that the areas chosen for the new farms were still virgin hardwood forest when the settlers were deposited in them. These massive forests of jarrah, marri and karri had been by-passed by earlier free settlers or had been designated as potential State Forest. They were often remote from civilisation without rail or decent roads. The new settlers were placed into “groups” whose menfolk carried out the initial clearing and construction of cottages on the twenty 120-acre blocks that made up each Group. Individual settlers were later allocated (by ballot) one of the 120-acre “farms”. This typically comprised a few acres of rough pasture and bracken fern dominated by ringbarked trees, and a horse and a milk cow. The government funded the initial development work, gave each settler the land freehold, plus a loan to use to buy stock and equipment and then basically left the settlers to sink or swim. The idea was that the loan would be paid back once the farm became productive. The first “groupies” started work in the bush in the early 1920s.

Pioneer settlers at Boojetup in about 1925: Linda and Neil Smith with their children Jessie, Alex and Mick, and the good dog Teddy

The Group Settlement scheme was mostly a disaster. Few of the new settlers had bush or farming experience. Most were fresh off the boat, having previously lived urban lives in London or Manchester. Converting heavy forest into farms with only an axe and a mattock proved harder than expected [2]. The settlers also had to contend with infertile soils, rabbits, dingoes, wet cold winters and summer bushfires … but it was the onset of the Great Depression in the early 1930s that broke most hearts. At best, farm income was just able to cover day-to-day living but few of the settlers even achieved this. Paying back the loans became out of the question. A great many of the original groupies simply walked off. Some of the abandoned properties were consolidated and acquired by survivors, the others ended up in the hands of the government’s Agricultural Bank, and lay idle, eventually being reclaimed by the bush [3].

Ellen’s grandparents Neil and Linda Smith were survivors. Firstly, Neil was a tough, second-generation Australian, with plenty of bush experience, a range of useful skills and massive determination. Secondly there was Linda and the three children Mick, Jessie and Alex, all of whom worked on the farm often from dawn to dark, seven days a week.

Pioneer children: Jessie, Alex and Mick Smith, bucketing water from the well for the calves, the dairy and ringbarked paddocks beyond. The boys are proudly wearing their boy scout uniforms. The local Scouts troop was about their only form of recreation, other than what they could organise for themselves

The Smiths grew their own oats, hay, and fruit and vegetables, had pigs and chooks, and ate rabbits. They drank their own milk and made their own butter and cheese.  Linda’s bread was the finest in the district - she was an expert bread-maker, her father having been the baker at the south coast timber town of Denmark. And from time to time, Neil, Mick and Alex all brought in off-farm income to augment the monthly cream cheque (Neil cut and sold firewood, Mick worked on the Michaelides tobacco farm, and Alex drove a “poison cart” on neighbouring properties in the campaign to control rabbits). Neil’s brothers Charlie and Bert were frequent visitors and when they were down, they worked.

At the farm, probably about 1935. Left to right: Alex, Neil’s brother Charlie, Jessie, Linda, Neil, Mick and Neil’s brother Bert.

It was a hard life, with few frills, but they survived, their spirit was never broken, and their sense of humour never wavered. The farm eventually prospered and is still in the family today, farmed by Neil and Linda’s grandson and great-grandson [4].

Back to Granny’s tea set

Here is an interesting thing: in all the years since it was given as a wedding present to Linda in 1914, and then as a wedding present to Ellen in 1966, right up to today as I write this story, the tea set has only ever been used once.

For one thing, fine bone porcelain wasn’t used in everyday life in pioneering farm cottages in those days. Bushmen and early settlers drank their tea from enamel mugs, or from the sort of cheap heavy “railway” crockery that received (and could survive) rough treatment. Moreover, in the case of many bushmen, including both my grandfather and Ellen’s, tea was not drunk from the cup at all, but poured into a saucer and sipped.

[An aside: My grandfather Bill Chandler was expert at drinking hot black tea from a saucer. It was a performance that fascinated his grandchildren.  We would watch mesmerised as he held the saucer about a half-inch from his lips and then exerted a slurping and powerful suction. This would draw the tea across the void between the saucer and his lips, cooling it in passage. He used the same technique when drinking hot soup].

The Tea Set’s One Great Day

The occasion on which Granny’s tea set actually did duty was an auspicious one. It was in the mid-1930s. The Great Depression was biting deep, the Group Settlement Scheme was floundering. Settlers, crippled by debt, broken in spirit and with no future as farmers, were leaving their blocks in droves. When the price of cream plummeted, things went from merely tough to disastrous. The southwest of WA was indeed, as one Groupie put it, “a fine country to starve in”.

The Premier of Western Australia, who was also one of the architects of the Group Settlement Scheme and its greatest booster, was James Mitchell (known derisively to the settlers on the Groups as “Moo-cow Mitchell”). He had finally been convinced that he should come down and have a look at what was going on. Perhaps, it was hoped, he would then appreciate the plight of the Group Settlers and do something about it. A tour of inspection was arranged, and this was scheduled to include “an afternoon tea with a typical Group Settlement family”.

James, later Sir James “Moo-cow” Mitchell, one-time Premier and later Governor of Watern Australia. In his biography of Mitchell, Geoffrey Bolton described him as “courteous, florid, ample in paunch and jowl”. Mitchell once said: 'I have lived in the world's best climate and done justice to the world's best food'.

Ellen’s grandparents Neil and Linda Smith were chosen to host the Premier’s afternoon tea. In fact, as survivors, they were not “typical Group Settlers”, but they were chosen because (as Neil later dryly remarked) “We were about the only people around who could be relied upon not to whinge to him.”  

Never mind! A visit from the State Premier! This called for something special.

So, Linda’s wedding present tea set finally saw action. It was brought out and became the centrepiece of the event.

The Premier and his entourage duly had their cup of tea and a dish of Linda’s buttered scones. Sad to say, no official comment on her afternoon tea, or on the beauty of her tea set was recorded for posterity. Sadder to say, the image of the hardworking and cheerful Smith family did not portray to the visitors the stark realities and tragedies suffered by the majority of the settlers.

Moo-cow departed, back to the city, the plight of the settlers was unrelieved, and the tea set was carefully washed, dried, wrapped in newspaper, and put away. It was not to see the light again for another 30 years, when it came into Ellen’s possession. Nor could Ellen bear to sully it, the set remaining wrapped and packed in her treasures cupboard over the nearly sixty-odd years of our marriage.

Thus, my photograph shows cups, saucers and plates used but once, albeit by the State’s Premier and future Governor of Western Australia.

I never met Ellen’s grandfather Neil, but I did know her Granny Linda. When we lived at Pemberton and Mick was working for the APB, he would sometimes bring Linda down from where she was living in a retirement home in Manjimup, and she would spend the day with Ellen. I always joined them for lunch, if I could. I vividly remember Granny. She was a tiny lady (she stood less than five feet in height), had piercing blue eyes and merry laughter. Ellen’s mother Jessie was a war-widow, and Ellen had been brought up on the farm with her mother and grandparents. It was touching to see how she and her Granny loved each-other so dearly and I was very happy to be part of that, even at the very periphery.

Ellen’s Granny Linda Smith, not much taller than a fence post, Groupie cottage in the background, feeding an apple to the farm horse Bell, probably at about the time she hosted the visit from Sir James Mitchell

I was telling this story to my mate Jack the other day and he suggested I contact the current State Premier, invite him for afternoon tea at our cottage at Gwambygine, and serve it on the Wedding Present Tea Set, making him the second Premier to do so. I somehow doubt he would accept, nor could I imagine Ellen being interested in anything remotely political. On the other hand, a grand family afternoon tea is on the cards. Ellen makes delicious scones, and I can easily envisage them (with strawberry jam and cream), accompanying a hot, strong cup of tea, all served on the famous tea set. I might even put in a bit of training and demonstrate to the young ones how to drink tea from the saucer, using the grandfather technique.

Afterwards, I expect, the tea set will be washed, dried, wrapped and put away, awaiting its next outing, fulfilling its role as wedding present over the generations of Lindas and Ellens.

Endnotes

1.      On the back of each piece in the tea set there is a maker’s mark. This reveals that the tea set was made in England, by Phoenix Pottery, run by Thomas Forester and Sons. There is no date, but obviously it was made some time before 1914.

               The maker’s mark on Granny’s Tea Set   

If there is a porcelain expert out there who can tell me that it is worth a fortune, I will be pleased to hear from them.

2.      I will never forget talking to an old bloke at Northcliffe once who had come out to the Groups with his parents. He told me how once, when they were living in “a slum” in London before coming to Australia, his mother had taken him on a bus ride to a far-off suburb to “see a tree”. He was nearly five years old before he saw his first tree. It boggles the imagination to think how these people felt when confronted by their new “farm”: wall-to-wall giant hardwood trees.

3.      In 1964 I worked for some months assessing and appraising former Group Settlement farms east of Northcliffe. They had been ringbarked and partially cleared in the late-1920s and then abandoned in the 1930s. These areas now carried beautiful stands of regrowth karri, the trees having self-seeded into partially-cleared paddocks. Running assessment lines through this forest I would occasionally come across the poignant sight of a mouldering cottage, a mossy post-and-rail fence, a straggling fruit tree or climbing rose. The properties were all freehold, and owned by the Agricultural Bank, who did not want them and had them on the market. The price was 10 shillings ($1) per acre. On the basis of my surveys, I was able to recommend to the Conservator of Forests that a large number of these properties (those with the finest forest) be purchased by the Forests Department and they eventually became (in effect) State Forests.  

Today in 2025 the age of the regrowth forest on these former Groupie ‘farms” is getting on for 100 years, almost qualifying it as ‘old growth’. The last time I looked, traces of the failed agricultural venture of the 1920s could no longer easily be discerned. The passing years, summer bushfires, winter storms and termites have done their work, and the artifacts of agriculture, as well as the memories of the disillusion and heartbreak of those who lived there, are fast becoming erased.

4.      By coincidence my paternal Grandfather James Underwood with his wife, two sons and a daughter were also pioneers in rural Western Australia. They took up virgin land at Waddy Forest in the northern wheatbelt in 1921, the same year that Ellen’s grandparents joined Group 11 at Bootejup. Waddy Forest was salmon gum and gimlet country, easy clearing compared with the great forest country of the southwest, but equally challenging in other ways. There were hard times during the Depression, when they lived on rabbits and boiled wheat, but came out the other end with a prosperous wheat and sheep farm. This is no longer in the family, my father pursuing a career in agricultural science and my Uncle Gilbert having no children to pass it on to.

Further reading

A fine country to starve in by Geoffrey Bolton

Growing up at Boojetup – the stories of a mother and daughter and their links to the HMAS Sydney wartime disaster by Ellen Underwood

James Underwood – a memoir of my Grandfather by Roger Underwood